Manual Mode Dining: Emotional Eating - Fifth Article in the Series

In the previous episodes, we suggested keeping an "eating journal" to help us identify emotional eating patterns in our lives. The goal, as we presented it, is to systematically record every instance of eating throughout the day, detailing its nature, quantity, and form, while considering the emotional climate that accompanied it before, during, and after. This tool can indeed help us identify emotional eating by highlighting a direct link between a low emotional mood and inefficient eating. However, beyond that, this tool can also help us manage this emotional eating.

Once we have identified emotional eating, we can list the emotions that led us to seek comfort and repression through food. This list actually represents the emotional challenges we face. To prevent them from continually driving us to the refrigerator, we must provide them with genuine and quality solutions.

So now, we will attempt to examine each of these emotions and suggest a non-food solution. For example: if stress caused us to eat an entire chocolate bar, we might ask: How could we manage stress differently? What could we do instead?

Perhaps reducing stress could involve seeking help from another person? Maybe a timeout for a few moments, or listening to music might relieve the feeling of stress? Perhaps with a well-organized work plan, the stress would take on a completely different proportion and cease to burden us? And so on.

We need to learn to cope with negative emotions. Not to suppress them, but to develop awareness regarding them. When we succeed in identifying the emotions that cause us to eat, and more precisely: the emotions that food serves as a coping mechanism for, we can find alternative ways to deal with them.

For example, if we identify that every time we experience anger, our hand reaches for a piece of cake - we can learn how to pause, identify the anger, experience the unpleasant feeling, and seek a solution that does not disrupt our nutritional balance.

When we learn to manage the range of emotions that currently lead us to unnecessary emotional eating - there will no longer be a need to eliminate emotional eating, as it will disappear on its own.

Managing Emotions

Besides what has been discussed, it is important to learn to manage our emotions instead of letting them manage us. Emotions, fundamentally, serve as important tools meant to signal us the need for change in our lives. For example: when we experience boredom, the emotion signals that it is time to add more meaning to life: meet new people or create new experiences; when we experience stress, it is a signal that it is time to create a change in our daily routine and better plan it; when we experience regret, it is a sign that it's time to take responsibility for areas in life that we have yet to take responsibility for; and so on.

Thus, we need to learn to accept even the emotions that cause us discomfort. People do not like attributing negative emotions to themselves, and therefore, they try to blur them and mask their existence through eating. However, once they assimilate that every emotion is legitimate, and learn to accept the full range of emotions, they will be able to deal with the presence of various emotions, including the negative ones, without trying to escape them or blur their existence.

Moreover, it is important to allow emotions to be present in the body on a physiological level. As we mentioned, each emotion generates a feeling, and it is not always a pleasant sensation. However, the more we allow even unpleasant sensations to be present and refrain from silencing them - we can redirect emotional resources towards more effective coping with the emotional triggers leading to the current state, rather than focusing on escaping the consequences of these triggers. To do this, we need to try to understand the roles of the different sensations generated by the emotions and discover how they can serve us instead of threatening us.

Another important point is discharge. When tension is released from the body, it must be broken down to allow it to dissipate. A very effective way to do this is through physical activity, which helps manage negative emotions.

And in conclusion, perhaps the most important: we need to learn to express the emotion and give it voice. Even unpleasant contents will be far less threatening when they are expressed in a way that allows them to be externalized, rather than continuing to store them inside - a place where they continue to grow and intensify.

Friendly Emotions

Once we succeed in recognizing our emotions and internalizing their existence, we can proceed to the next stage: whenever we feel the need to eat something to alleviate a negative emotion, we try to stop for a moment, turn off our 'automatic pilot', and switch the decision-making system to manual mode. We try to insert this pause between the moment we decide to eat and the moment we approach the refrigerator.

It's not necessarily about a pause before eating. It is a more broad acquired habit: we sometimes fail to make the necessary separation between cause and effect, that is, between the emergence of a particular emotion and the practical reaction it prompts. We are accustomed to reacting immediately, automatically, to the existence of every emotion; thus the boundary between emotion and response blurs, causing the emotions, or in other words the impulses, to control us.

Therefore, it is important to train the psyche generally not to react immediately to emotional stimuli, but to take a timeout to "dwell" within the emotion - feel it, recognize it, examine it, and only then shape the most appropriate mode of response. When we practice seeing emotion as a helpful factor rather than an adversary - it will naturally be much easier to do this. We will not try to escape the emotion upon its emergence, but we will be able to dwell in it, "embrace" it a little and observe it - to internalize the signal it seeks to convey.

Thus, we can practice inserting a pause between impulse and action. Although every emotion naturally creates an impulse for action, appropriate training can integrate a dimension of delay between these two stages, allowing us to respond differently from the automatic response pattern. In other words: respond intelligently.

If we practice stopping for a moment, even just sixty seconds, before acting automatically under the emotion's influence, we can examine the automatic response, the impulse the emotion leads to, ensuring that it indeed optimally serves our true interests. This is an experience that lasts only sixty seconds, but its reward is immense: it can gradually lead to a change in character!